In its heart, the state perceives and records, not in units of human beings, but in bodies,
categories, classes, groups. One of the most important categories invented by the modern
state is the category enemies. Even in its infancy in the 1400s and 1500s, the modern
state was ringed about with foreign enemies and permeated with internal enemies, as Machiavelli
makes clear. By the 19th century, Western powers had decided that birth in the territories
of a different state was enough to qualify one as an enemy. The decisions of the state
in whose territories these people had left suddenly defined them in their new home, that
is, as enemy aliens. With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, from Central to Western Europe,
In North America and in Australia and New Zealand, the fate of a host of people, designated
as enemy aliens, was internment behind barbed wire.
That the 20th century added barbed wire to the arsenal conceived by Machiavelli is a
commonplace.
Barbed wire has been the indispensable tool of the modern state, from Dachau to Guantanamo.
But it's perhaps not so common knowledge that virtually every belligerent power in World
War I locked up enemy aliens behind barbed wire in internment camps that ruined individuals
and families and blazed the trail for the vast concentration camps of Hitler and Stalin
and beyond. Barbed wire, you might say, both focuses and symbolizes the violence that backs
the theory and practice of the modern state. The invention of barbed wire in the 1870s
opened up whole new vistas for the state. I've written about the invention of the barbed wire
concentration camp by the Spanish, British, and Americans between 1895 and 1907 in wars of empire
in Cuba, South Africa, and the Philippines. But I recently began working on the next chapter,
internment camps of enemy aliens during World War I. Almost everybody knows about the American
and Internment of Japanese in the Second World War, but few are aware of the continuous history
of internment from 1914 onward. Today I will limit myself mainly to the European powers
in World War I, indeed mainly to the Entente powers. You remember who that was. That was
the side that made the world safe for democracy. The moment the war broke out in August 1914,
The British government targeted resident individuals entirely legal who had not applied for naturalization
and were aliens. Most of the male enemy aliens in Britain were slated for internment. I will
tell something about this program by means of an example. Let us say a German craftsman,
a commercial embroiderer perhaps, moves to England to set up shop around 1900. He does
has good business, makes a good living, meets an English girl, marries her, has some children.
In an age before passports and green cards, he's enthusiastic about Great Britain, but
he never sees a need to formalize his status as a British subject. True, the category of
enemy aliens exists in law at this point, but it's likewise true that Britain has for
a century given up persecuting those resident civilians whose home country is a belligerent
of Country on the opposite side in some war or other. Hence, our tradesman in London goes
blithely on without noticing the increasingly careful efforts that European governments
are taking to categorize battlefield enemy competence, to categorize wounded enemy soldiers,
captured enemy soldiers, enemy civilians who do what they are told by the invading army,
enemy civilians who put up resistance to invaders, etc. There are suddenly rules and identifications
Then the war broke out on August 4th, 1914, and by the end of the month, enemy aliens were
already being rounded up. Some had already reached the Isle of Man in the middle of the
Irish Sea by the end of August. But back to our tradesman, whom I might as well name since
he was a real person whose records I looked at in September on the Isle of Man. He was
Max Gotzhalt found himself arrested and transported to the Isle of Man. There were many internment
camps in the UK during the war, but the most permanent was the Nak'Elo camp on the Isle
of Man. This internment camp sprang up on pasture land, just over a ridge, on a kind
Fickla and her four children tried to maintain the family business, and Max attempted to
to coordinate things from NACALO, but all communications were by letter.
Sensors confiscated many of them, so Max and Thecla were never sure which letter had made it.
Thecla both took care of the children and tried to run the small embroidery workshop business.
No one could predict either the length of the war or the length of internment, so planning was short-term at best.
As the war dragged on, Max instructed Thecla to cut corners in various ways,
make specific deals with various vendors and factories, and finally to sell off some of the embroidery machines.
By 1917, Thekla hardly had food for her children. She sent a few parcels to Max at Nakelo,
but he always reprimanded her since he couldn't stand for the children to go hungry.
Her dealings were triply difficult. Since she was married to an enemy alien,
A ruling of the authorities made her an enemy alien too. So English-born, she was ruled
to be an enemy alien. She got help from no one. The war ended, but the worst was yet to
come. The British government decided that most of the enemy aliens would be returned
to their country of origin. Max was among the vast majority who were, going right from
from the camp directly to Germany, except that Germany was starving because of the illegal
British hunger blockade of all goods throughout the war. Some 800,000 German civilians would
die of starvation during the war and its weight. The economy was chaos, there was violence
in the streets, the currency was being destroyed by inflation, and Max's family didn't go
He wrote a few letters from Germany, but by 1921, he was asking Thekla to avoid describing his family's plight since he could do nothing about it anyway, and he just could not bear to know about it.
His letters from Germany stopped coming in 1921, and Thekla never heard from him again.
Here is a single tragic experience of a few individuals, and there were millions of such
stories in the world from 1914 onward.
A short listing gives some idea of the magnitude of the state's internment of enemy aliens
and a related but much more useful category that emerged rapidly, undesirable persons.
France ran a string of internment camps throughout World War I that, as we'll see, went into
of the Postwar Period, both military and civilian POWs, as they said.
Canada interned thousands of enemy aliens, mainly Ukrainians.
Australia interned all persons, citizens or not, who were of German descent.
In the United States, with half a million Germans and three million aliens who came
from Austria-Hungary, only those suspected of being dangerous were interned.
Well, the war ended in November 1918 and the camps were slowly dismantled. Families and
lives had been destroyed, but there were other tragic repercussions as well. The ideas of
internment flourished. The Bolsheviks may not have invented the concentration camp,
I'm still in the beginning phases of the larger project that I'm working on, but some characteristics
One point seems obvious, but I'd like to state it clearly. The whole process of internment
was a process related to war. These camps were invented because of war and inside of
war. And the whole progeny of internment camps, concentration camps, refugee camps, all of
those, would be a product of war, and especially the war of the state against its internal
Another point is that the state tended to recycle its war-related properties. One prominent
example of this is the real estate that was the site of the first and most important Nazi
concentration camp, Dachau. As a developed landscape outside of the town of Dachau, just
north of Munich, the Dachau site began life not as an internment camp in World War I,
in WWI as a munitions plant. Hence it was a place where there was plentiful state investment,
there was this war industry, etc. And the land belonged to the Bavarian state, partly
to the German state. After 1918, the factory closed and the out-of-work thousands contributed
to the highest unemployment of any city in post-war Germany. Indeed, when Hitler came
came to power in 1933. The first Nazi goal was to identify the enemies of the state and
lock them up. The lands of the Dachau Munitions Plant, long deserted, presented themselves
as a perfect solution. Large area, already surrounded by barbed wire, some existing buildings,
a huge workforce of guards, plumbers, truck drivers, etc. That was in 1933. Hence, there
There was a kind of recycling of state properties from munitions plant, in this case the concentration
camp. But these are institutions that are in many ways related to each other. This recycling
aspect is important, I think, because for all of the state's inefficiencies, or maybe
I should say this, perhaps because of the state's inefficiencies, this recycling has
been not only a prominent feature of many internment camp stories, but also a driving
As in the case of Dachau, the existence of the internment enclosures have also seemed
to suggest to the state further internment of this enemy or that.
In connection with this recycling process, as I'm calling it, the most striking part
of my search has to do with the network of interrelated internment camps in southern
France.
Much of the original documentation on these camps is either missing or still secret, so
So my research with these has so far consisted more in establishing a kind of spatial understanding
of this network of camps. To do this I went to southern France to a region along the Mediterranean
just north of the Franco-Spanish border in one of the areas pictured a moment ago. It
was still Spain back then but it's in France now. And my wife Karen and I visited a number
A military barracks had already existed from about 1937 when the
In 1938, the French began to intern masses of Spanish refugees fleeing Franco's forces.
These undesirable aliens were the first internees, but not the last by a long shot.
In only a year or so, the remaining undesirable aliens were joined by enemy aliens from throughout
France.
That would be Germans and others because the Germans and the French went to war.
As in Dachau in 1933, the camp was great for the local economy. Local people found work
as guards, cooks, truck drivers, guard tower carpenters and whatnot. A kind of a French
New Deal. But France fell to Germany in 1940 and under the peculiar rules of the occupation
regime the camp began to receive a new category of undesirable aliens, namely Jews on the
The Run from Nazis who made it in some way to France or to some place where they were
captured by the French. Also gypsies were put there along with the others, many of whom
were still there. Both groups, both of these undesirable alien groups were later transported
to the terrible French concentration camp at Drancy and the survivors thence to Auschwitz.
But wait, there's more. Liberation and these camps revive. No doubt, same camp guards.
As German POWs are now put there along with some undesirable displaced persons. But this
can only go on for so long and by 1950 the POWs go home. But wait, there is more. In Algeria
the Dirty War happens in the late 50s. France gets out of Algeria. The French settlers,
the Pied Noirs, have a very difficult time coming home. But they're French. Those Muslim
Some Algerians, the Harkis, who were on the French side in the dirty war, fled to France,
where else, and where to put them.
How about the concentration camp huts at Reef Salt?
So from 1962 to 1977, there are families of Harkis eking out some kind of existence there,
something like a Palestinian refugee camp.
Then that was liquidated.
But wait, there's more.
French Middle East policy led France to some odd choices, and in the 80s, they pulled a
The group of Kurdish refugees out of either Turkey or Iraq. Where to put them? Well, you guessed it.
So this group was added, and then later some more illegal aliens from the 1986 terrorist swoops that France made.
This camp was finally ended, finally relocated, 2007.
To conclude, the state invents this institution of locking up large numbers of people.
Now, barbed wire made it all possible in the late 19th century, and the state, in its
uneconomic way, achieves this recycling of facilities.
Uneconomic, but by a certain logic, adept and inventive.
When my wife and I visited the most derelict sections of the Reeves Salt Camp last November,
we wandered around speechless, desolation all around as far as you could see, ruined huts
And the barbed wire is not merely the tool of the modern state. The barbed wire is in its heart.